1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a food management system for managing food carried by a food conveying apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
A restaurant commonly known as a revolving self-service sushi restaurant adopts a food conveying apparatus including a conveyor line to encircle tables. In this type of restaurant, a cook puts food such as sushi on e.g. a plate and then feeds the plate into the encircling conveyor line of the food conveying apparatus to transport it to the tables in order. A customer selects the food such as sushi of his/her choice from the foods conveyed in order, taking it out from the conveyor line.
The sushi restaurant having this food conveying apparatus involves the problems that the sushi conveyed is easy to dry and may possibly be touched by mistake by other customers. It is accordingly desired to provide the sushi sanitarily and prevent the sushi from drying.
To solve the problems, the applicant previously proposed a food plate carrier comprising a mounting platform having a plate resting portion for resting thereon a plate on which food is put, a cover which is attached to the mounting platform in such a manner as to open and close with respect to the plate resting portion, to cover the plate resting portion of the mounting platform, and an open and close mechanism for allowing the cover to close when the plate is rested on the plate resting portion and open when the plate is removed therefrom.
Meanwhile, in the case of the food conveying apparatus mentioned above, if the cook(s) in the kitchen can get the data on the number and the kind of the food taken out from the food plate carriers among the number of the served food on an as-needed basis, he/she can do the cooking and serving more smoothly.
Also, the food conveying apparatus mentioned above involves the problem that the food fed onto the conveyor line continue to go around along the encircling conveyor line until being taken out by the customers. If not taken out from the conveyor line for a long time, the food served will lose freshness as the time passes, and as a result, the food that is beginning to lose freshness may be provided for the customers.
Under the circumstances, according to a related art, for example an IC tag is attached to each plate on which the food is served and the data written in the each IC tag of the plate conveyed is read out by a reader, so that the contents of the food eaten are discriminated on an as-needed basis by a controller and then are informed to the kitchen, to provide an improved efficiency of the kitchen work, or the food remaining in excess of a predetermined time can be discriminated from the foods fed on the conveyor line so that it can be removed from the conveyor line (See JP Unexamined Patent Publication No. Hei 8-414).
However, since for example a restaurant of the size of about 200-seats usually needs a large number of plates of the order of 1,600 plates, if the IC tags are attached to all the plates, there arises the problem of increase in initial cost as a whole.